Friday, October 30, 2015

The Apostle Paul reminds us that joy
is at the center of the Christian's life. We are Easter people. Christ has
defeated death. God has vanquished Satan. Easter has conquered Good Friday.
That means we are people of joy. That is how Saint Paul, writing from a Roman
prison, a difficult circumstance that would cause most people to lose hope,
writes to the Christians in the church in Philippi, "REJOICE in the Lord
always. I shall say it again: REJOICE!" (Philippians 4:4) Roman prisons
were dark, dank places of death. Most prisoners died there. Yet, Paul found joy
in his imprisonment.

In fact, in a letter from prison to
the Philippians, rather than writing of his suffering and worries, Paul
mentions his "joy in Christ" more than twelve times in just four
chapters. That is worth hearing: Even in the most difficult times in your life,
you can rely upon the deep, abiding joy that comes from Jesus Christ. The world
and your circumstances may press in and seek to crush you, but a relationship
with Jesus will grow a joy in you that cannot be squelched.

Thursday, October 29, 2015

I
have seen the marks of the cross upon Him, and by His grace the marks of the
cross have been put upon me and I am no longer my own; I am bought with a
price, redeemed by His precious blood. Yes, I have seen Him - not in the
outward physical sense only, but in the inward sense of a deep spiritual
reality. I have had a clear view of Jesus and my life will never be the same
again.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

"Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer
and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to
God;and the peace of God, which
surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ
Jesus."(Philippians 4:6-7 NKJV)

Fretting springs from a determination to get our own
way.Our Lord never worried and He was
never anxious because He was not 'out' to realize His own ideas; He was 'out'
to realize God's ideas … Deliberately tell God that you will not fret about
that thing.All our fret and worry is
caused by calculating without God.

Monday, October 26, 2015

One
of the blessings of living in daily fellowship with God is developing a settled
heart. You realize your salvation is accomplished and complete. You recognize
how many things are beyond your control. And you begin to understand that
trusting Him is a lot more effective than fretting and losing sleep. He takes
care of you either way. So why waste the nervous energy?

Inner
peace is not a formula. It's not treating God like a good-luck charm. It's
about spending time reading His Word. Praying when you could be listening to
sports radio. Talking to Him instead of talking to yourself. Relationship, not
ritual. Try it consistently for a month, and you'll look back a few weeks from
now amazed at the amount of perspective and security He's given you. You'll be
more like a [person] who has "no fear of bad news," whose "heart
is steadfast, trusting in the Lord" (Psalm 112:7).

-- Joe Gibbs in his blog
Game Plan for Life: Two-Minute Drills, 12/10/12

Friday, October 23, 2015

To Johann Sebastian Bach,
the distinction between sacred and secular was a false dichotomy. All things
were created by God and for God, no exceptions. Every note of
music. Every color on the palette. Every flavor that tingles the taste buds.

Arnold Summerfield, the
German physicist and pianist, observed that a single hydrogen atom, which emits
one hundred frequencies, is more musical than a grand piano, which only emits
eighty-eight frequencies.

Every single atom is a unique
expression of God's creative genius. And that means every atom is a unique
expression of worship.

According to composer
Leonard Bernstein, the best translation of Genesis 1:3 and several other verses
in Genesis 1 is not "and God said." He believed a better translation
is "and God sang." The Almighty sang every atom into existence, and
every atom echoes that original melody sung in three-part harmony by the
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Thursday, October 22, 2015

God can give us discerning hearts to recognize the fear in
our anger, the muffled hope in our cynicism, and the wounds we carry as
weapons. God can help us see ourselves as He sees us, and love ourselves and
others with His gracious love.

-- adapted from Alive Now Magazine, published by
The Upper Room, Nashville, TN.Used with permission.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

"You
keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in Your bottle.
You have recorded each one in Your book." (Psalm 56:8 NLT)

None
of the tears that you ever cried in your life were wasted or in vain.
Everything you wept over honored those moments in life as valuable and
important and those feelings of sadness were sacred to your Soul.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Jesus did not give easy answers. His prodding questions
and original answers were designed to wake up the minds of both His followers
and His adversaries, to stretch the boundaries of their consciousness. On more
than one occasion, He had cause to say, "You have missed the point
again" (Matthew 22:29).

Monday, October 19, 2015

In
1939, a coast guard vessel was cruising the Canadian Arctic when the men
spotted a polar bear stranded on an ice floe. It was quite a novelty for the
seamen, who threw the bear salami, peanut butter, and chocolate bars. Then they
ran out of the food. Unfortunately, the polar bear hadn't run out of appetite,
so he proceeded to board their vessel. The men on ship were terrified and
opened the fire hoses on the bear. The polar bear loved it and raised his paws
in the air to get the water under his armpits. We don't know how they did it,
but eventually they forced the polar bear to return to his ice pad -- but not
before teaching these seamen a horrifying lesson about feeding polar bears.

Some people make the same mistake with sin that these
sailors nearly made with the polar bear. They begin feeding it -- a little at a
time without thinking through the consequences. "It says something about
our times," writes Willard D. Ferrell, "that we rarely use the word
SINFUL except to describe a really good dessert."

Friday, October 16, 2015

Offering God's love multiplies the fruitful life.By offering Christ, we complete God's grace,
the grace we received when we invited God into our lives and made room for Him
in our hearts.The receptivity that
opened our hearts to God opens doors to others.Our lives become a doorway through which people enter into spiritual
life.God with us becomes God through
us.As we invite and encourage others
into the life of Christ and stimulate their spiritual exploration, we perceive
God working through us.We become
"ambassadors for Christ, since God is making His appeal through us"
(2 Corinthians 5:20).Grace becomes
tangible through invitations.

Thursday, October 15, 2015

I cannot
continuously say 'No' to this or 'No' to that, unless there is something ten
times more attractive to choose. Saying 'No' to my lust, my greed, my needs,
and the world's powers takes an enormous amount of energy. The only hope is to
find something so obviously real and attractive that I can devote all my energies
to saying 'Yes.' ... One such thing I can say 'Yes' to is when I come in touch
with the fact that I am loved. Once I have found that in my total brokenness I
am still loved, I become free from the compulsion of doing successful things.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

As we seek to become more and more economically
independent, as we become more and more secure, we remove ourselves from our
need to be "helped." We separate ourselves from the possibility of
community and miss the opportunity to experience the richness of loving
relationships. Henri Nouwen once wrote, "…every time I am willing to break
out of my false need for self-sufficiency and dare to ask for help, a new
community emerges -- a fellowship of the weak -- strong in the trust that
together we can be a people of hope for a broken world."

Monday, October 12, 2015

When
the heart is well-ordered, we are not only increasingly free from sin, but also
increasingly free from the desire to
sin. If the heart were truly well-ordered, we would love people so much we
would not want to deceive or
manipulate or envy them. We would be transformed from the inside out.

Imagine
what the world would be like if it were filled with people who had well-ordered
hearts. Television programs such as Miami
Vice would be replaced by Miami
Virtue. Tabloids sold at grocery stores would be filled with stories about
acts of lavish generosity and spontaneous sacrifice committed by noncelebrities
we have never heard of. Television talk shows would feature [morality and not
immorality.]

We would sleep at night the untroubled sleep of innocence
-- no staring at the ceiling at two o'clock in the morning because of regrets.
We would have no need for "do-overs" or mulligans.

Friday, October 9, 2015

"For it is God who is at work in you, both to will
and to work for His good pleasure."(Philippians 2:13)

The guidance of the Spirit is generally by gentle
suggestions or drawings, and not in violent pushes; and it requires great
childlikeness of heart to be faithful to it.The secret of being made willing lies in a definite giving up of our
will.As soon as we put our will on to
God's side, He immediately takes possession of it and begins to work in us to
will and to do of His good pleasure.

Thursday, October 8, 2015

"See
what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called
children of God! And that is what we are!"(1 John 3:1a NIV)

No
wound is so trivial that the love of God is not concerned with it. No pain is
so deep, so long-standing, that the love of God cannot reach it.

Every shock, every bleeding wound, every anger and grief
is not only encompassed by that love but is also held and transformed by that
love. The fact that it is in what we call the "past" makes no
difference to the power of God's love. All times are open and present to that
unsleeping, all-embracing [love of God].

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

[A
protective father's instinct…] That is the heavenly Father's deepest impulse toward
us. You are the apple of His eye. And anyone who messes with you messes with
Him. His protective instincts are most poignantly seen at the cross -- the
place where unconditional love and omnipotent power form the amalgam called
amazing grace. That's where the Creator stepped between every fallen sinner and
the fallen angel, Satan. That's where the Advocate took His stand against the Accuser
of the brethren. The Sinless Son of God took the fall for us.

The
cross is God's way of saying, "You are worth dying for."

When
that life-changing truth penetrates into the deepest place in your heart, it
transforms how you think, feel, and live.

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

"For
by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it
is the gift of God -- not the result of works, so that no one may boast."(Ephesians 2:8-9 NRSV)

A
headline in the Grand Rapids Press read, "Conversion to Hindu Faith
Is Tortuous."The article stated
that a German businessman had completed his conversion to the Hindu faith by
piercing himself through the cheeks with a ¼-inch-thick steel rod and pulling a
chariot for two miles by ropes attached to his back and chest by steel
hooks.Other converts had walked through
long pits of fire, donned shoes with soles made of nails, or hung in the air
spread-eagle from hooks embedded in their backs.

Aren't
you glad that conversion to Christianity is not accomplished by self-inflicted
torture?In contrast, Jesus Christ was
afflicted with one of the cruelest forms of torture ancient Rome could devise so that He could freely
give you the gift of salvation.Jesus
paid the price for your conversion so that you could not and would not have to
do a thing to earn it.The only
requirement is for you to receive the greatest gift God gave.

Monday, October 5, 2015

To
say of an act done, "My conscience is quite clear", sounds smug and
satisfactory. It does not by any means follow that the speaker's conscience ought
to be clear.It may simply show that
[it] is sadly unenlightened.

Thursday, October 1, 2015

South African pastor Trevor Hudson identifies
compassionate caring as the distinguishing mark of faithful discipleship:
“Compassionate caring creatively balances the inward-outward dynamic so
characteristic of Jesus’ life, saves us from falling prey to the latest fad in
the spiritual supermarket, and catapults our lives into a deeper engagement
with the brokenness of our world.” Hudson
goes on to claim that making a pilgrimage with those who suffer is one
practical way to cultivate the “grace-soaked” gift of compassion in our
lives.

-- Don C. Richter in
Mission Trips That Matter: Embodied
Faith for the Sake of the World

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Welcome to SOUND BITES

By David T. Wilkinson

Over the years I have collected quotes that pertain to the Christian faith and life in general. As I have read or studied what others have written, I have been struck by the profound thought that is captured in their few short words. These quotes have been shared through SOUND BITES Ministry™ , a five-day-a-week inspirational e-mail ministry, and now are shared through this blog as well. You will also find us on Facebook by clicking SOUND BITES Ministry on Facebook.

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How SOUND BITES came to be

During Lent 1999 God prompted me to think about a new idea as to how I might share these thoughts with a broader audience. At the same time, our family was experiencing the first anniversary of the death of our son, Dustin, who died at the age of sixteen from a brain tumor. So, beginning on that anniversary, March 29, 1999 we began an e-mail ministry in memory of Dustin that we call SOUND BITES: Something to chew on that is good for the soul™. Five days a week, Monday through Friday, I share one of these quotes with subscribers. Hopefully recipients find something of faith and life to think about and chew on, which feeds their soul and helps them grow spiritually. Since its inception, over 4200 daily quotes have been sent out. The subscriber list continues to grow numerically and geographically with subscribers in every state in the U.S., and also in Canada, Mexico, and numerous other countries around the world. Currently close to 2000 subscribers receive SOUND BITES directly via e-mail and many others second hand. Now through Facebook, Twitter and this blog we expand our outreach even more. A number of years ago we had folks share how GOD has used our SOUND BITES Ministry™ to minister them. To read their comments click 13th Anniversary Comments.